Students caffeinate at a popular coffee
shop across the street from the Homewood
campus. Photo by
Will Kirk

I've stayed close to Johns Hopkins since I arrived as a
freshman in 1960. As I evolved through grad school, alumni
volunteer roles, a stint as the director of alumni
relations in the 1980s, and as the parent of a Hopkins
graduate in the 1990s, I watched the university change. Now
back in Baltimore after a 14-year absence, living two
blocks from Homewood, I have shocking, unsettling news I
must report to my fellow alumni.

Johns Hopkins — the campus that former president
Steven Muller once jokingly called "America's premier nerd
university" — has become cool.

I don't know when I first discovered the upsetting truth.
Maybe it was when I was sipping a cup of very good coffee
at a café on University Parkway, staring at the
snazzy new stadium with cutting-edge synthetic turf, while
watching the eclectic crowd of townies and Hoppies around
me clack away on their wireless laptops.

Perhaps it was while I wandered down St. Paul Street,
where new JHU off-campus buildings rub elbows with hip bars
and cafés to create a real, bustling college-town
environment. Privately developed high-end condos were
sprouting around me in a neighborhood now called Charles
Village — a term that didn't exist in my student days
and that most of us would have hooted at if we'd ever heard
it.

Hopkins' whole setting has changed. "The armpit of the
East Coast," as Noo Yawkers called Baltimore back in the
day, is one of America's great urban rebound
stories.

Or maybe my Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment was the
gorgeous summer evening my wife and I strolled across
campus to the Baltimore Museum of Art, sat in the sculpture
garden listening to a jazz quartet, sipping a microbrew and
munching a wrap. Then we followed the crowd to ice cream
and espresso at a sidewalk café across Charles
Street.

Other nights, we went to the summer outdoor movies on the
quad....

My God! What has happened here?

For starters, Hopkins' whole setting has changed. "The
armpit of the East Coast," as the Noo Yawkers called
Baltimore back in the day, is one of America's great urban
rebound stories. The Inner Harbor sparkles. (Well, except
for the water itself. They still give you a tetanus shot if
you fall in. Nonetheless . . .) The housing market is red
hot. Nearly 10,000 people live downtown. In the '80s I'd
explain to far-flung Hopkins grads that the Fells Point
neighborhood had become a happening place, and they'd stare
at me as if I were beginning to molt before their eyes. Now
the city that once envied D.C. for being Camelot is awash
in creative types, many of whom commute to Washington and
revel in living somewhere real and vibrant and not in a
federal theme park.

It's not only the city that's succumbed to coolness.
Homewood has, too. The hard fact we must face is that
Hopkins has one of the loveliest urban campuses in America.
Azaleas and dogwoods frame new brick walks. Homewood House
is a sophisticated museum open to the public. The Georgian
architecture still oozes that serene Enlightenment-era
confidence in rationality and the power of knowledge; new
buildings keep an updated version of that same vibe. The
moldy gym I remember athletic director Marshall Turner
guarding so protectively is now a 203,000-square-foot
athletic center with a state-of-the-art fitness facility.
Sunset still ignites the stained glass windows in the
Gilman reading room, but the busy campus outside bustles
year-round, and has spilled over into the park behind and
the city in front.

Shockingly, almost all our sports teams are doing very
well. Our football team is league champ. Baseball is a
force in Division III. Women's basketball consistently wins
20 a season. Of course, we've always been a men's lacrosse
power, and we take it as our due that we're defending '05
national champions. But lacrosse is not the obscure
regional thing it was when I came to campus from 40 miles
south never having seen the game, ever. The sports
tradition we've been known for all along, and which we
dominate once again, has enormous cachet.

I'm struggling to convey the full, devastating impact. The
nation's sharpest students clamor to get in here. The kids
on campus are as attractive as they are bright. We produce
Rhodes Scholars. We have the Peabody Conservatory and a
theater program headed by John Astin, a Hollywood star
who's also an alum. The university president rollerbladed
to a student event. The first Rolling Stone College
Guide: Schools that Rock included JHU in its top
100.

America's premier nerd university? MIT and Cal Tech would
arm-wrestle us for the title, of course (OK, challenge us
to hackey sack), but we'd still hold our own, wouldn't we?
Well, here's the ultimate irony. In the age of Silicon
Valley and iPods, nerdiness itself is now cool. Seek no
further than the Hopkins engineering alum and
early-adopting computeroid who is now the billionaire mayor
of New York City.

Though alumni will still recognize the place, with its
earnestness of purpose and cutthroat pre-meds, the wheel of
trendiness has turned, and Hopkins is on top. Fellow
alumni, we're going to have to rethink all our cherished
certainties about JHU.

How bad is it?

People around the country who hear that I'm from Johns
Hopkins no longer automatically ask if I'm a doctor....